Two weeks before Christmas, my sister phoned in the middle of the night to tell me she'd had to commit her schizophrenic son to a mental health facility 800 miles from where I live.

My goddaughter called to tell me her otherwise healthy, 61-year-old father had had a stroke while recuperating from surgery.

A second sister called to say her 15-year-old cat — her only "child" — had an inoperable throat tumor and might have to be put to sleep.

One of my best friends, a mother of two, called to tell me she'd broken her ankle and would be off her feet for six weeks. Just in time for Christmas.

It wasn't like I had a choice: I dropped my Christmas to-do list, flew to Memphis where my first sister lives and stayed for a week. I talked almost daily with my exhausted and bewildered goddaughter, especially as the situation became round-the-clock and her father began experiencing one blood clot after the other. I talked almost hourly with my grieving other sister as she took her cat for a second opinion and then a third, then buried her cat with red rose petals in her back yard in New Orleans.

When I returned home to Ohio from my sister's house seven days before Christmas, I found my friend with the broken ankle needing daily help — buying stocking stuffers for her children, mobilizing to a doctor's appointment the Friday before Christmas and generally getting through to Dec. 25 without slamming her removable cast through the living room window next to the couch where she sat hour after hour.

I don't tell these stories to make myself a saint.

I tell these stories because during that week with my sister, when I otherwise would have been over-thinking the pecan pralines I either undercook or overcook ever year, I became closer to my sister than I have been in years. Maybe ever.

My friend with the broken ankle and I spent focused time we don't usually have, uncovering a depth to our friendship we might have overlooked. The time I usually would have spent buying, and then packaging up a gift to my goddaughter, I spent talking to her instead.

"I didn't get around to sending a gift this year," I said.

"Pfft," she said across the phone lines, and I imagined her waving her hand in the air hundreds of miles away.

There were some of us who said these were awful things to have happen at Christmas.

Meanwhile, I have to wonder if there was no better time.

I have often made the pledge at Christmas to adhere to some of the suggestions in the books, "Unplug the Christmas Machine, or Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas." The authors of these books, as might be expected, suggest we dispense with so much baking and buying, decorating and wrapping and focus our Christmas energy instead on seeking out ways to experience community and connection.

Because of what befell them, my two sisters were stopped in their Christmas tracks, as were my goddaughter and my friend, as were their families and friends around them. Everybody within vision had to rethink, regroup and reprioritize Christmas, including my own husband and children who had to let me, and some of their usual expectations, go.

We experienced community and connection this Christmas, not because some book told us to, not because we knew we should.

All on its own, this Christmas became less about things and more about people, less about getting Uncle Bob's socks in the mail on time and more about giving Aunt Susan what she really needs: someone to listen to her talk about how much she loved her Buster, even though he was "just a cat."

All by itself, this Christmas became a Christmas with genuine heart.

Now that we know what it feels like, we can find it again.

(Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook lives in Kent, Ohio, with her husband and three children and has been writing about family life since 1988.)

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